Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Young Knowledge on record - Ian Wedde and Robin Hyde

19 November, 2012

On Friday 26th October, in front of a screen on which was projected the
extraordinary 1936 photograph by Spencer Digby of Iris Wilkinson – the poet who
called herself Robin Hyde – five of us sat down to talk about a single poem of
Hyde’s, ‘Young Knowledge’. A good-sized audience was there in Auckland Central
Library’s whare wananga, including Hyde’s son, Derek Challis, and his wife
Lynn.All of us had particular interests in Hyde’s poem. Apart from Derek Challis
seated in the audience, the two with the most obvious authority to talk about
‘Young Knowledge’ were Michele Leggott, editor of Hyde’s collected poems; and
Mary Edmond-Paul, editor of Hyde’s autobiographical writings. Michele detailed
the painstaking editorial work involved in assembling the poem from typescript
pages whose coherence had been compromised; and locating it in the circumstances
of Hyde’s life. At an early stage, then, we encountered the puzzle of what might
appear to be two separate poems or at least two separate impulses spliced
together; Michele argued for their coherence. So, by implication, did Mary, in
terms of subjective or psychological coherence rather than manuscript evidence –
though of course the text and its affects are not separate.Though Iain Sharp modestly disclaimed any such direct connection with Hyde’s
poem, he too had good credentials for talking about it. As the author of a
superb illustrated biography of the explorer and artist Charles Heaphy, Iain was
able to map the historical circumstances of the poem’s strange ‘turn’, the
moment when its succession of intense, sometimes hallucinatory takes on what
constitutes knowledge abruptly shifts to two historical moments and places in
the nineteenth century. The first of these picks up and even cuts-and-pastes a
fragment of Edward Markham’s account of settlers felling ship-building timber in
Northland; and then relocates without transition to a place near the Arahura
River on the South Island’s West Coast, visited by Heaphy in May 1846. Here,
while looking for good arable land, the explorer seems to be ambushed by the
poem at the moment he encounters a Maori community of ‘Greenstone people’ until
then unknown to European settlers.It’s at the moment of this encounter, at once vividly imagined by Hyde and
factually documented in Heaphy’s journals (which Hyde had read close to the time
she wrote the poem), as well as in a subsequently published magazine account,
that Hyde’s poem releases its extraordinary burst of energy – its key moment of
‘mindfulness’, as Mary described it. Mindfulness is a concept used in modern
clinical psychology since the 1970s, but related to much older Buddhist concepts
of knowledge as acute awareness of and attention to the presentness of things,
the present moment – sati in Pali, in Sanscrit smrti. Ranged
against sati are the kinds of negative forces of anxiety and delusion
with which Hyde was familiar. Full piece at NZ Poet Laureate